


Body Parts

by Sab



Category: The X-Files
Genre: (Uploaded by Punk), Decay of the Flesh, Eating Lunch Outdoors, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-04-11
Updated: 2000-04-11
Packaged: 2017-11-29 23:49:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She paid for her own lunch. (Uploaded by Punk, from The Sabrary.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Body Parts

**Author's Note:**

> This followed so weirdly and immediately on the heels of my post-"all things," though it's entirely unrelated. I just started writing and couldn't stop. Never smack a gift-muse in the face, I say. So here's a tiny thing.
> 
> For Virginia, with extraspecialbeta thanks to Alicia K., Caz and the PunkView. And for Hillary Robson, with a glass raised to the mutual appreciation society. Thanks.

With the pink tip of her small pink tongue she lifts a bit of potato chip from the heel of her hand.

Like men do, he pushes nickels, dimes, quarters in the palm of his hand with a fingertip, slow-mo as if to brag, as if to say, "I have thirty cents. No. I have thirty-five. No, indeed. I have forty. I am a man."

She shifts a little in the wiremesh white-rubber-painted seat, waiting for him to pay the man at the roach coach and come join her. Her sandwich is already a quarter eaten on the table, and she rests a childlike forearm, oddly disproportionate and peachy, against the corner of the formica, letting the edge bite into the healthy flesh of her elbow.

She paid for her own lunch.

He sits down now, across from her. Something about his neck has gotten old, older, ruddy, stretching up beyond his tie. She recognizes him in it, coming up on forty and the truth revealed between strong chest and strong chin. There are bumps there above his Adam's apple, razor-burn, the chickenflesh of the no-longer-young. She averts her eyes and takes a bite of watercress on wheat with fat-free mayo.

She's lost something in those eyes, some shimmer of gold-on-blue he remembers from centuries ago. "I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you." There are callouses there now, toughened mounds where tears would be if she were the kind of person who cried. Anymore.

It's sunny and by design she's got her back to it, glints off a copper dome of midday unwashed hair. He squints at her, crowsfeet puckering at the corners of his grey-green eyes.

"That is the most pathetic excuse for a sandwich I've ever seen," he says. "I'm almost embarrassed to be sitting with you."

"Mulder," she says with her mouth full, "not all of us can eat cheese with cheese and maintain our girlish figures."

It's spring and he forgives the wandering glance because he considers himself invited, and he lets himself map out her girlish figure under what department stores might call a Cream Silk Shell. Something about the sun on white makes her bloom before him, makes her huge. The angular shapes of her breasts blossom to enormity and for no good reason he remembers her white and splayed after her abduction, all glow and swelling and hair dry and tousled and unkempt and cheeks fiery with the unadmissable power of what had been done to her.

She is not beautiful. She is familiar.

"Hmpf," she says, apparently pleased with her apparent ability to shut him up. She slides the mylar bag of potato chips toward him, turning it on its axis like it's Spin The Bottle. There's a tanline where her watch usually sits; the back of her hand has pushed up veins and he can see them, blue, at work.

Caught in a slice of sunlight as she turns, she blinks, scrunching her nose. Something old has taken her cheeks; under powder and base they're pockmarked, dry hairs holding flakes of makeup away from the skin. Somewhere under there there are freckles and he looks for them, painting them with the brush of memory. Caught in a slice of sunlight her mouth turns up despite itself and a smile forms, smoothing wrinkles and for a moment she is youth, and she is dynamic and she is shadowed again and it's gone.

He knows every square of that face, every gridded inch. Over years he's watched the life drain like color bleached from curtains, he's watched her grow from life and grow toward him. He's watched her evolve, and devolve.

"Bet me," he says, balling up the butcher paper from his sandwich between fingers that are just starting to sprout hair above their knuckles. "Two bucks says I make it."

She shields her eyes with a hand, pudgy rounded thumb tapering into too-thick nail, its brittle self strengthened by extra layers of clear polish, and turns to peer across the promenade, into the sun, at the wiremesh City of Washington D.C. trashcan.

The back of her neck is narrow, ridged like a bird-spine; her small hairs stand on end in the breeze. "You're on."

He lets it sail and the wind catches it; it lands inches from her feet. She picks it up, dangles it in front of his face and laughs.

Somewhere across the promenade there's a couple that's grown old together. Early fifties, maybe, they've started to look like one another, started to look like their dog. She, the woman, turns around so he, the man, can tuck his sweater into the backpack she's wearing. Under khaki shorts, she's got varicose veins. He unlocks the bicycle and walks it down the flagstone; she lets the dog – a greyhound – walk her.

By the time Mulder and Scully cross to the trashcan the couple's gone. Scully sucks at the last melted watery ice and diet coke in the waxy plastic cup before tossing it. Her brastrap is showing and she nudges it with a thumb, tucks it up inside her shirt leaving a pink canal where it had cut into her shoulder. Without a look at Mulder, she heads for the steps.

He reaches in, retrieves the sandwich paper and slam-dunks it triumphantly.

She's already inside when he follows, halfway down the hall somewhere, pupils dilating for the artificial light that could never approximate the sun.

Somewhere he's in the hallway too, toes big and feet sweaty in scuffing shoes, wondering if he remembered to gas the car.

They're always somewhere, separately. Alone they dwell on the way they've grown, faces changed for the miles and years. Together they fit, complement, step in time, step in time. Together the standards change. Separately they linger, pretending they don't feel the difference in the space of their bodies when they part.


End file.
